Meet the acting president

Special report: US election raceAmerica goes to the polls next week, but the country's entertainment industry has already voted. Its ideal president is a warm-hearted liberal who looks just like Martin Sheen. Martin Kettle reports from Washington

Jackson Evans and Josiah Bartlet have raised no campaign funds, addressed no meetings, hired no consultants and aired not a single ad in the US presidential election. Yet both of these leading Americans have helped to shape the Gore-Bush contest, and both will have a home in the White House irrespective of the result of Tuesday's vote. That's because they are fictional presidents.

The two men are presidents in, respectively, the latest Hollywood White House movie, The Contender, and the award-winning television drama series The West Wing. Presidents Evans and Bartlet have other things in common. Both are pragmatic but liberal-leaning Democrats. They are Hollywood-handsome guys. They are dignified but know how to relax and relate. They are capable of taking stands on matters of principle. And neither of them has ever had an affair with a White House intern.

Evans and Bartlet are examples of the Democratic presidents that Hollywood liberals would like the US to have had in recent years. They are Clinton without the naughty bits. Both men exemplify America's love affair with the platonic presidency.

The West Wing offers a vision of the Clinton administration as it might have been without Monica Lewinsky and Ken Starr. Aaron Sorkin's weekly scripts invite Americans to see President Bartlet and his staff as warm-hearted political professionals whose moral consciences remain alive and close to the surface at all times. They constantly wrestle behind the scenes with the rights and wrongs of the policies and tactics of White House life. The fundamental theme of the series is that this administration is populated by nice people, with whose sense of decency we can all identify.

"He's the president we would all love to have," says Peter Rollins, a film historian at Oklahoma State University. "There's so little back-biting in his White House. These are people who really care. They are the leaders we crave. Character is not one theme - it's the theme. It's clearly propaganda for the Democrats."

Bartlet is played by Martin Sheen, who has plenty of White House experience, having played JFK for television as well as Michael Douglas's chief of staff in Rob Reiner's movie The American President. Sheen has also been drumming up support for Al Gore in California and Washington over the past month. "I'm the acting president," Sheen recently joked on a TV talk show.

Just as it is impossible to watch The West Wing without thinking of Clinton, so it's hard not to see something of the real president in Rob Lurie's new movie The Contender. President Jackson Evans, played by Jeff Bridges, has many things in common with Clinton. Evans is nearing the end of two terms in the White House and is preoccupied with ensuring his legacy. Fate intervenes when the vice-president dies, providing the president with the opportunity to nominate Senator Laine Hanson (played by Joan Allen) to be America's first woman vice-president.

Hanson is the central figure in the movie, which concerns the ruthless attempts by a Gingrich-style Republican congressman (Gary Oldman) to block her nomination by fair means or, for the most part, foul. As in The West Wing, the president remains slightly remote from the narrative, though Bridges manages superbly to convey a richly complicated Clintonesque character who is sexy, charming and folksy yet ruthless and pragmatic.

Though one senses that President Evans might very easily respond if a curvaceous intern flashed her thong at him, this president puts his reputation firmly on the line for sexual equality rather than sexual gratification. His climactic moment is purely oratorical, as he calls on Congress to stand by his choice of Hanson and thus renew the American dream.

It's a moment of purest hooey, accompanied by lush strings, and Oldman has denounced Hollywood studio chiefs for allegedly re-cutting the movie to make it more propagandist than Lurie intended. Oldman says that DreamWorks bosses Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg (bigtime Democrats all) forced Lurie to edit the movie to mesh with Al Gore's election agenda.

Although that claim is only partly credible, Oldman is on to something. The film is a piece of propaganda.

The Contender, like The West Wing, is part of the increasingly freewheeling re-creation of the ennobled presidency for the entertainment age. For most of the 20th century, Hollywood made movies about real presidents in preference to purely fictional ones (notable exceptions being Gabriel Over the White House, in 1933, and Doctor Strangelove). Abraham Lincoln was a particular favourite, and Washington, Wilson, both Roosevelts and JFK (in the 1963 Cliff Robertson movie PT109) were the subjects of heroic biopics.

All this began to change with Richard Nixon, Vietnam and Watergate. Nixon has of course featured in a significant list of films - notably All the President's Men, Oliver Stone's Nixon and last year's brilliant minor classic Dick. But his legacy to the movies - and to American public life - is even richer. He exposed his own misdeeds so blatantly that even the most starry-eyed idealists had no alternative but to see the dark side of the presidency.

From the late 1960s the biopic was pretty much dead. But the need to venerate the presidency and the president is rooted deep within the American psyche. No other advanced nation outside the totalitarian world has such a compelling need to revere its political leaders. So Hollywood has played an increasingly important role in supplying the collective need for heroic and principled presidents.

For many Americans, including himself, Ronald Reagan created a presidency that was an unprecedented mixture of fact and fiction. If Reagan was frequently unable to tell the difference between real life and the movies, it is not surprising that Americans would blur the distinctions too.

Clinton's presidency has seen a remarkable acceleration of this process. With the exception of Nixon, real presidents no longer feature on the Hollywood agenda. Imaginary presidents, on the other hand, are now so thick on the ground that they are the subject of academic books and conferences, including one that Peter Rollins is helping to organise just after the real election.

Broadly speaking, presidential movies fall into two categories. There are those that depict the president as a man of action, such as Independence Day, in which the president destroys an alien invasion, and Air Force One, where Harrison Ford performs spectacular heroics to recapture his plane from a group of terrorist hijackers led by Gary Oldman (again). Then there are those that depict him as a man of wisdom and judgment, a benign if worldly embodiment of a nation at peace with itself. The West Wing, The Contender and The American President fall into this category.

In each of these categories the president is manifestly Un-Clinton in one way or another. The presidential action movies compensate for Clinton's lack of a military past and Vietnam draft evasion. The feelgood domestic presidential movies compensate for Clinton's sexual dalliances and the trauma of his impeachment.

Over the past few years, Hollywood has created, as never before, an idealised parallel presidency alongside the real one. For a nation that is already awash with contentment and prosperity, these platonic presidents have served a comforting purpose. If President Clinton is not up to standard, at least the US can be proud of Presidents Evans and Bartlet. Yet when Americans say (as they do) that they find George W Bush "presidential", one inevitably wonders what that means now. If they mean he is properly equipped for the most demanding public office in the modern world, then clearly it's nonsense. But if they mean he could slip unobtrusively into the warm, fuzzy presidency that Hollywood has invented, then that's far more credible - and somehow a lot more scary.

 A conference, Images of American Presidents in Film and Television, is taking place in Simi Valley, California, from November 10 to12. Details: http://h-net.msu.edu/~filmhis